So, I just finished watching Obama's speech on race and I need to be honest. I was moved. at various points i wanted him to say something terrible because I know that he is essentially a representative of the ruling class and I hated being moved by someone I know is my strategic enemy. And, at various points, he did say terrible things, like blaming "radical islam" for violence in the middle east and calling israel an ally. But by and large Obama said things that...spoke to me. Dammit, i never thought i would say that, but it's true. Does that mean I support him? No. But it does mean I have to write at least one more post on someone I have been trying to move out of the center of my writing. Well, here goes...
About a year ago I finished reading Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment, a book about one of the most amazing mass movements in u.s. history. And one of the things that really impressed me was when the historian who wrote the book characterized the populist movement as a struggle for the soul of the country; a struggle to determine whether everyday people would finally take hold of democracy or whether the wealthy would beat back the people and impose a still more oppressive system. I was reminded of something I had read in The Many-Headed Hydra, a quote by Thomas Rainborough (a radical of the English revolution): "Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy".
The populist movement was an attempt of the "plain people" (as they called themselves) to use democracy and organizing to destroy the corporate power that was killing them. Theirs was indeed a class struggle. But Goodwyn emphasized that it was a class struggle in a time when it was thought that the wealthy could be subdued. When "America" actually meant (for some/many people) the triumph of the working-classes over aristocracies. Today, however, the oppressed do not think of "America" as a beacon of hope. America is the symbol of the new aristocracy, of the power of property and wealth to destroy democracy. But the populists were not ready to concede "America," its land, wealth, labor, creativity, or people, to the ruling classes. Theirs was a fight to unite the plain people, the hands and hearts that were this country. For them America was working class. it was the corporate bourgeoisie which was "anti-american".
Being raised a Black nationalist, I was weened on discourses like those of Frederick Douglass' July 4th speech, in which he says that the day of independence for whites is a lie and a hypocrisy for enslaved Black people. I was raised to understand that "America" had gotten rich on the blood and sweat of Black folks, Brown folks, the genocide of the indigenous, labor of Asians, and the pillage of the world. Later on as I became more and more attracted to marxism, I began to understand that "America" had been built on the backs of "white" immigrants as well. America became the metaphysical entity that embodied the exploitation and destruction of the entire world.
But this past summer I was struck, once again, by another vision. It happened when I was reading James & Grace Lee Boggs. In The American Revolution and in Revolution & Evolution in the 20th Century, and also in Grace Lee's aurobiography, Living for Change, I found a different way of seeing America. James Boggs once said "I love this country not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of its potential, what I believe it can become." Clearly it was not the America of corporate executives and power with impunity which he loved. No. It is the America that is the living and the now passed people who struggled for a more just society. The Boggs' maintainted that in order to change something, you must love it. I was reminded of Paulo Freire who said: "If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love people--I cannot enter into dialogue" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
Reading and meditating on these things I realized for the first time that the vast majority of people in this country have a real material and humanist interest in ending the system of social oppression that holds us all down. I realized that there does indeed exist a broad working-class interest and even consciousness. For the first time, reading these texts, I was consumed by a faith in the ability of our people to achieve an American Revolution. I have not really been a Black nationalist since (though I don't suggest that anyone test me on my fierce stance on the right of Black people for autonomy in struggle and in culture).
But my experience over the years is what has made these readings so meaningful. I have spent the last few years in a pitched struggle with the people I love the most around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I know that these divisions are real and that they must be confronted. But I believe that it is extremism to declare that they are differences that cannot be united. That unity, as Amilcar Cabral said, must be one built through struggle. Queer people, women, people of color, and all sorts of other folks must have their own autonomous power to demand that unity does not mean limiting the issues to the lowest common denominator. Yet our struggle with one another is not a struggle against one another. It is a struggle for unity, a unity so that we may struggle to transform the world. Paulo, when he spoke of dialogue, was speaking of the love that must infuse the struggle among comrades in the effort to change our world.
I sit here today and know in my heart that the unity that I am struggling for is a unity, dynamic and characterized by the autonomy of its members, of the working-class. I do not mean simply those who work in factories. I mean those who are forced to labor for others in order to simply earn enough to live. Some live more or less decently, in this country and around the world, but we are all workers in the sense that our labor does not belong to us and instead contributes to the amassing of wealth, power, and tyranny amongst a very small minority of people.
Now, what does this have to do with Obama? You see, Obama speaks to the desire of people to come together and transform the world. He knows that we crave this and need it. His messages are crafted to cut through the cynicism and rally people together. The trouble, however, is around what he is rallying them. The ruling class, here in the u.s. and around the world, is in a panic. No one believes in the system anymore. So many people are jaded and dissatisfied. Obama represents the most visionary arm of the ruling class trying to mobilize the working-class of this country to achieve what nothing else can: a more powerful country.
They want a more powerful United States. That is, amore powerful military, a more "competitive" economy, a more powerful corporate-state system with which to meet the new challenges in a world no longer beholden to u.s. power. They are doing their best to rally people around the unity of the nation-state. The idea of a unity between people, the political-economic system, and the rulers. That's what a nation-state is. The conservatives are doing it one way, by declaring that some people are "un-american". The democrats do this in another way, by telling us that we are all americans.
The truth is that the vast majority of us are Americans. I mean this in the most expansive sense. We are the people whose lives are tied to the history of the Americas (plural). We are the people whose future is irreducibly interwoven with the life of the land of these two continents. We are the inheritors of a vast, tragic, triumphant history. We are indeed American, from the southern tip of Chile to the northern reaches of Canada. But we are not the united states. We are not the ruling class. The unity of the American peoples is not a government, but a comradery, a solidarity of many peoples; the circulation of struggles and culture and hope.
When the indigenous peoples of Chiapas speak my African heart knows the language. When my friend Jacob speaks of his struggles, I know them. I have learned that I have a place in my sould for Poland because I know Justyna. I have felt an obligation to understand or at least listen to the efforts of straight men to love and be loved. When women speak about patriarchy I am moved because I am implicated and I am asked to join in something common. This is La Otra America, the Other America which continues to be robbed and humiliated.
Today I know that if we are to struggle together and love together we need to bring forward our vision of La Otra America. Unity is not unity of a country or a continent. It is the unity of many different peoples struggling against the various and vicious ways that capitalism manifests: slavery, peonage, unemployment, alienation, work, schooling, prisons, starvation, AIDS run rampant...
Our unity must come from our unique heritage(s). All of the America(n)s have been subjected to the domination of the United States (which contrary to rhetoric includes the comprador states that claim to represent the peoples of latin America).
Obama teaches us something: unity is powerful. But we must struggle against the false unity with the ruling class. What unity is this that deprives so many of simple needs so that some may live in grotesque luxury? What unity can there be between those who buy and sell jobs, retirement, whole countries, food, the land and water itself only for profit and allow the vast majorities to suffer? No, this is not the unity we want.
The unity of the working-classes, against capital, against exploitation, against the degredation of women, queer people, the environment. Against the marginalization and humiliation of people of color. Against the attempt to erase the radical history, culture and dignity of our french-, english-, irish-, jewish- American comrades. The struggle for the soul of a continent is ours and in it we join the struggle of a planet, of many histories.
Obama's appeal is really an appeal to what is, at its heart, the awakening of many people to the understanding of the need for unity in order to bring about change. I am profoundly convinced, however, that this "change" must mean an end to the capitalist system which is racist, hetero-patriarchal, imperialist, and alienating. The task before us is to show that La Otra America, the American peoples, rather than the united states, have an interest in the overthrow of the global system of capital. The task is to grasp the fact that in some ways Obama is speaking to working-class consciousness and that it is a representation of the current moment's uncertainty that the ruling class must reach out in such a way.
The contradiction is that once it is grasped that the broad, collective interest is the overthrow of corporate capitalism, then the ruling class will carry out a full-scale attack on this unity. They want to include themselves in our unity and elevate their interests as the common interests. We must show that, while our interests are many, it is only the wealthy elite who have a continued interest in the maintenance and deepening of capitalism. Our struggle for unity must be clear on this point or "unity" will simply become the fascist unity that erupted in the wake of the economic crises of the world war period.
Now, more than ever, when even politicians in the republican party have to at least appear opposed to corporate greed in order to win over even the small sector of the American people who vote, we need to be part of building a new vision and a new unity. An anti-capitalist unity, a working-class unity in which the people(s) are many but the struggle, for dignity and liberation, is shared. This does not mean we reduce everything to 'economic' issues (wages, benefits, etc). It means that we, each of us committed to real change, come to understand that the endless imposition of work by capital and the endless accumulation of wealth by capitalist is the single biggest barrier to having time with those we love, living in harmony with our ecosystems, having enough to eat, learning and growing, loving how we want to, travelling, becoming artists, coming to understand one another, and knowing that life is really worth living.
Obama knows that unity is the only way forward to change. But he wants unity without struggle against capitalism. He wants to unite us under the banner of the nation-state. We want a unity of the coming together of many nations--queer nations, black, brown, indigenous, youth, etc nations--against the united states. Obama quoted in his speech the motto of the united states: e pluribis unum--out of many, one. Let us reject this attempt to regroup us once again under the banner of states and corporations. Out of many, many I say. Many chiapas, many selmas, many caracas, many porto alegres, many zapatistas, cimarrones, xigonas, sodomistas!
Long live the many-headed hydra!
Long live La Otra America!
About a year ago I finished reading Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment, a book about one of the most amazing mass movements in u.s. history. And one of the things that really impressed me was when the historian who wrote the book characterized the populist movement as a struggle for the soul of the country; a struggle to determine whether everyday people would finally take hold of democracy or whether the wealthy would beat back the people and impose a still more oppressive system. I was reminded of something I had read in The Many-Headed Hydra, a quote by Thomas Rainborough (a radical of the English revolution): "Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy".
The populist movement was an attempt of the "plain people" (as they called themselves) to use democracy and organizing to destroy the corporate power that was killing them. Theirs was indeed a class struggle. But Goodwyn emphasized that it was a class struggle in a time when it was thought that the wealthy could be subdued. When "America" actually meant (for some/many people) the triumph of the working-classes over aristocracies. Today, however, the oppressed do not think of "America" as a beacon of hope. America is the symbol of the new aristocracy, of the power of property and wealth to destroy democracy. But the populists were not ready to concede "America," its land, wealth, labor, creativity, or people, to the ruling classes. Theirs was a fight to unite the plain people, the hands and hearts that were this country. For them America was working class. it was the corporate bourgeoisie which was "anti-american".
Being raised a Black nationalist, I was weened on discourses like those of Frederick Douglass' July 4th speech, in which he says that the day of independence for whites is a lie and a hypocrisy for enslaved Black people. I was raised to understand that "America" had gotten rich on the blood and sweat of Black folks, Brown folks, the genocide of the indigenous, labor of Asians, and the pillage of the world. Later on as I became more and more attracted to marxism, I began to understand that "America" had been built on the backs of "white" immigrants as well. America became the metaphysical entity that embodied the exploitation and destruction of the entire world.
But this past summer I was struck, once again, by another vision. It happened when I was reading James & Grace Lee Boggs. In The American Revolution and in Revolution & Evolution in the 20th Century, and also in Grace Lee's aurobiography, Living for Change, I found a different way of seeing America. James Boggs once said "I love this country not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of its potential, what I believe it can become." Clearly it was not the America of corporate executives and power with impunity which he loved. No. It is the America that is the living and the now passed people who struggled for a more just society. The Boggs' maintainted that in order to change something, you must love it. I was reminded of Paulo Freire who said: "If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love people--I cannot enter into dialogue" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
Reading and meditating on these things I realized for the first time that the vast majority of people in this country have a real material and humanist interest in ending the system of social oppression that holds us all down. I realized that there does indeed exist a broad working-class interest and even consciousness. For the first time, reading these texts, I was consumed by a faith in the ability of our people to achieve an American Revolution. I have not really been a Black nationalist since (though I don't suggest that anyone test me on my fierce stance on the right of Black people for autonomy in struggle and in culture).
But my experience over the years is what has made these readings so meaningful. I have spent the last few years in a pitched struggle with the people I love the most around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I know that these divisions are real and that they must be confronted. But I believe that it is extremism to declare that they are differences that cannot be united. That unity, as Amilcar Cabral said, must be one built through struggle. Queer people, women, people of color, and all sorts of other folks must have their own autonomous power to demand that unity does not mean limiting the issues to the lowest common denominator. Yet our struggle with one another is not a struggle against one another. It is a struggle for unity, a unity so that we may struggle to transform the world. Paulo, when he spoke of dialogue, was speaking of the love that must infuse the struggle among comrades in the effort to change our world.
I sit here today and know in my heart that the unity that I am struggling for is a unity, dynamic and characterized by the autonomy of its members, of the working-class. I do not mean simply those who work in factories. I mean those who are forced to labor for others in order to simply earn enough to live. Some live more or less decently, in this country and around the world, but we are all workers in the sense that our labor does not belong to us and instead contributes to the amassing of wealth, power, and tyranny amongst a very small minority of people.
Now, what does this have to do with Obama? You see, Obama speaks to the desire of people to come together and transform the world. He knows that we crave this and need it. His messages are crafted to cut through the cynicism and rally people together. The trouble, however, is around what he is rallying them. The ruling class, here in the u.s. and around the world, is in a panic. No one believes in the system anymore. So many people are jaded and dissatisfied. Obama represents the most visionary arm of the ruling class trying to mobilize the working-class of this country to achieve what nothing else can: a more powerful country.
They want a more powerful United States. That is, amore powerful military, a more "competitive" economy, a more powerful corporate-state system with which to meet the new challenges in a world no longer beholden to u.s. power. They are doing their best to rally people around the unity of the nation-state. The idea of a unity between people, the political-economic system, and the rulers. That's what a nation-state is. The conservatives are doing it one way, by declaring that some people are "un-american". The democrats do this in another way, by telling us that we are all americans.
The truth is that the vast majority of us are Americans. I mean this in the most expansive sense. We are the people whose lives are tied to the history of the Americas (plural). We are the people whose future is irreducibly interwoven with the life of the land of these two continents. We are the inheritors of a vast, tragic, triumphant history. We are indeed American, from the southern tip of Chile to the northern reaches of Canada. But we are not the united states. We are not the ruling class. The unity of the American peoples is not a government, but a comradery, a solidarity of many peoples; the circulation of struggles and culture and hope.
When the indigenous peoples of Chiapas speak my African heart knows the language. When my friend Jacob speaks of his struggles, I know them. I have learned that I have a place in my sould for Poland because I know Justyna. I have felt an obligation to understand or at least listen to the efforts of straight men to love and be loved. When women speak about patriarchy I am moved because I am implicated and I am asked to join in something common. This is La Otra America, the Other America which continues to be robbed and humiliated.
Today I know that if we are to struggle together and love together we need to bring forward our vision of La Otra America. Unity is not unity of a country or a continent. It is the unity of many different peoples struggling against the various and vicious ways that capitalism manifests: slavery, peonage, unemployment, alienation, work, schooling, prisons, starvation, AIDS run rampant...
Our unity must come from our unique heritage(s). All of the America(n)s have been subjected to the domination of the United States (which contrary to rhetoric includes the comprador states that claim to represent the peoples of latin America).
Obama teaches us something: unity is powerful. But we must struggle against the false unity with the ruling class. What unity is this that deprives so many of simple needs so that some may live in grotesque luxury? What unity can there be between those who buy and sell jobs, retirement, whole countries, food, the land and water itself only for profit and allow the vast majorities to suffer? No, this is not the unity we want.
The unity of the working-classes, against capital, against exploitation, against the degredation of women, queer people, the environment. Against the marginalization and humiliation of people of color. Against the attempt to erase the radical history, culture and dignity of our french-, english-, irish-, jewish- American comrades. The struggle for the soul of a continent is ours and in it we join the struggle of a planet, of many histories.
Obama's appeal is really an appeal to what is, at its heart, the awakening of many people to the understanding of the need for unity in order to bring about change. I am profoundly convinced, however, that this "change" must mean an end to the capitalist system which is racist, hetero-patriarchal, imperialist, and alienating. The task before us is to show that La Otra America, the American peoples, rather than the united states, have an interest in the overthrow of the global system of capital. The task is to grasp the fact that in some ways Obama is speaking to working-class consciousness and that it is a representation of the current moment's uncertainty that the ruling class must reach out in such a way.
The contradiction is that once it is grasped that the broad, collective interest is the overthrow of corporate capitalism, then the ruling class will carry out a full-scale attack on this unity. They want to include themselves in our unity and elevate their interests as the common interests. We must show that, while our interests are many, it is only the wealthy elite who have a continued interest in the maintenance and deepening of capitalism. Our struggle for unity must be clear on this point or "unity" will simply become the fascist unity that erupted in the wake of the economic crises of the world war period.
Now, more than ever, when even politicians in the republican party have to at least appear opposed to corporate greed in order to win over even the small sector of the American people who vote, we need to be part of building a new vision and a new unity. An anti-capitalist unity, a working-class unity in which the people(s) are many but the struggle, for dignity and liberation, is shared. This does not mean we reduce everything to 'economic' issues (wages, benefits, etc). It means that we, each of us committed to real change, come to understand that the endless imposition of work by capital and the endless accumulation of wealth by capitalist is the single biggest barrier to having time with those we love, living in harmony with our ecosystems, having enough to eat, learning and growing, loving how we want to, travelling, becoming artists, coming to understand one another, and knowing that life is really worth living.
Obama knows that unity is the only way forward to change. But he wants unity without struggle against capitalism. He wants to unite us under the banner of the nation-state. We want a unity of the coming together of many nations--queer nations, black, brown, indigenous, youth, etc nations--against the united states. Obama quoted in his speech the motto of the united states: e pluribis unum--out of many, one. Let us reject this attempt to regroup us once again under the banner of states and corporations. Out of many, many I say. Many chiapas, many selmas, many caracas, many porto alegres, many zapatistas, cimarrones, xigonas, sodomistas!
Long live the many-headed hydra!
Long live La Otra America!
3 comments:
Oh God. Sendolo, I'm taking this and I'm going.
who is "dogpoet"? curse the anonymity of the internet! well, you don't have to reveal your superhero ID, but when you said you were "taking this" and going, was that a good thing? (i'm terrible at reading tone in text)
Peace Sendolo,
I also found myself moved by Obama's speech and am struggling with that.
I found your ideas helpful in processing my own.
To be honest I was moved not just by certain parts, but by the worldview he put forward, a view which included recognizing America's sin in slavery and it's legacy still existing today, a critique of the Reagan Coalition of hate, and a call to move forward by recognizing a stake in one another, and even described racial tensions as a distraction from the attacks from corporate culture.
I feel like much of this worldview is still very much in conflict with the popular media affirmed narrative of America, but that he not only put it forward but tried to organize his audience around the truth in this view by connecting it to narratives they could relate to. Of course it's true that one such narrative was American exceptionalism and nationalism.
I think our current political system, its electoral process and such are inextricably linked to ruling class power, but I don't know what extent it is true that Barack Obama's engagement of that process makes him so linked that he himself becomes a strategic enemy.
Hmm. Though its worth recognizing that his engagement of this process has demanded that he get a Chief Financial Officer by the name of Penny Pritzker who actually own both your labor and mine and is an executor of the corporate culture he critiqued.
Well I guess I'll vote for him unless I find out you're running.
Post a Comment